“Those two are better than nothing. If this Red Hajason lived nearer my country I should send some of my young men to break off his head. He rather got the best of me on a batch of horses. And he’ll never come himself with a drove; always sends some of his tools.”

Sevier yawned. Instantly the emperor stood aside, bowed courteously and lamented:

“I am forgetting myself. Please leave your rifle and belt with the servant. And enter. You are most welcome to Little Talassee—my guest? Prisoner? I wonder!”

CHAPTER VIII
THE EMPEROR OF THE CREEKS

The McGillivrays were one of the prominent families springing from pre-Revolutionary marriages between the white traders and backwoodsmen and the Southern Indians. The rapid progress made by the Cherokee and Creek nations can largely be traced to such unions, as the white stock invariably was excellent. The descendants from such mixed marriages are not to be confused with some of the Western squaw men’s offsprings of later times.

The children of the Southern mixed-marriages, as in the case of Alexander McGillivray, were sent away to seaboard cities, or to Europe, to be educated. These returned with advanced ideas which they soon promulgated among their mothers’ people. One result in the South was an early introduction of schoolhouses and the importation of teachers.

McGillivray was an excellent type of the fruit of such a mixed marriage. From his beautiful half-breed mother, Sehoy Marchand, he had inherited the vivacity and audacity, the brilliancy and polish of the French, and the more reserved traits of the Creeks. From his father, Lachlan McGillivray, he received a shrewd Scottish mind and an ability to solve complicated problems and profit thereby. He was born at Little Talassee in 1746 and was a year younger than Sevier. Of him a President of the United States, more than a century later, was to write—

“Perhaps the most gifted man who was ever born on the soil of Alabama.”[[1]]

If he was actuated by great ambitions, he entertained them legitimately; for his mother’s family of the Wind was very powerful; by inheritance and tutelage he was propelled to aspire to high things. His mental equipment, too, was that of a man licensed to dream of lasting success and influence. If he was crafty, his need, nay, the instinct of self-preservation, required craft. James Robertson, Sevier’s old friend, characterized him as being—